Nuclear power is relatively safe when managed responsibly, and provides a consistant power output. When it comes to hydro electric , solar or wind; it is possible that drought, impaired sunlight, and days with low wind could lead to a day with zero energy or low energy output.
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A little bit off topic but somewhat related, a big problem is finding out how to tell people in the future that there’s dangerous nuclear waste there. What if they don’t speak our languages, or can’t read it? So there’s a very interesting thing called “nuclear semiotics” which is basically trying to figure out how to warn people in the future there’s dangerous nuclear waste there.
Yes, all the green options you listed are reliant on something happening in nature, aka, sunny days, windy days etc.
And they all suffer from uneven output and solar even suffers from highest output at lowest consumption.
Nuclear is a way more steady and stable power source, unfortunately nuclear creates nuclear fuel, and in the event of a natural disaster (or just irresponsible maintenance) can result in a whole lot of damage ecologically and monetarily.
Solar panels don’t really harm the environment and can be placed on top of buildings that are already in place.
Wind turbines are actually a hazard to birds and bats.
Nuclear is a good option for the time being, but not as good as solar/wind IF we can solve the issues I mentioned before.
We even have far superior reactor designs today than were ever in service, but it requires a huge investment to build a nuclear power plant, and people generally don’t want one near them.
Oil companies and various other groups have been lobbying and swaying public opinion on nuclear for a while making sure people are at best sceptical, and since politicians follow public opinion, nobody would sign off on the permit for a new plant because they will be loathed by the uneducated masses
i’ve read tons on nuclear power an i totally wish we used more of it but a huge problem is how the public perceives it makes it much harder to put infostructure in place for it
because past mistakes on managing it causing disasters people have a kind of negative reaction when you suggest it, also the word “nuclear” is generally negative in peoples minds so its kinda hard to gain support for it
The Nuclear Power you are referring to is the procedure of Nuclear Fission, which produces a lot of nuclear Waste. The Nuclear Fusion is far less producing nuclear waste, but unfortunately not yet available. This
https://www.iter.org
Project could be the solution of the energy problem.
In theory maybe. In practice finding a hole in the ground to bury nuclear waste permanently is not something that anyone has had much success with.
Many people don’t like living too close to wind turbines, but they really really don’t like a permanent nuclear waste storage facility near where they live.
The issue with nuclear waste is that is needs to be stored not just for a few years or decades or centuries, but what in terms of human organizations is basically forever.
There are some fun issues with marking a site in such a way that somebody as far removed from us in the future as the first guy to decided to domesticate a wolf in the past is from us, still understands not to dig the shit back up.
Warning signs that last longer than any language has lasted in the past are a challenge.
The other issue is that you don’t just need a hole in the ground. You need a cavern that is stable across millennia. No earthquakes, no earth movements of any kind, no groundwater seeping in….
Ideally it should be in some place dry, geologically stable far away from any place where humans now live, might live in the future and from any thing we might want to dig up in the future.
With climate change and everything it is hard to predict where there will be deserts and fertile lands centuries from now.
Even if you find some place like that, you still need to get your nuclear waste there.
Right now a majority of the spent nuclear fuel is stored near the reactors where they were used. You need to load them up and transport them by rail and truck to some hole in the desert.
People don’t like having nuclear waste transported though their neighborhood either.
Ensuring that the transport is safe and can for example withstand an accident or a container falling of a bridge or similar is a thing people work on. (Google CASTOR container).
One issue is who pays for all that.
Currently nuclear power plants are not very profitable compared to other energy sources. If you make it the companies problem to transport secure and permanently store the waste for the next however many millennia there won’t be any profit left for them.
If they have to set money aside for a guard or maintenance person looking over the nuclear waste storage site 2 centuries from now, they will not do that and instead declare bankruptcy and leave the taxpayer with the bill.
Most times that part comes up, somebody will point to theoretical designs of newer reactors that produce less waste and methods to reuse spent fuel and in other ways try to talk around the problem by pointing at solutions that don’t solve everything and don’t exist yet.
Meanwhile putting a few solar panels on the roofs of every new home and a bunch of wind power farms off shore or on ridges and hills where there is good reliable wind is rather uncomplicated.
You are correct that evening out the output of renewable energy is an issue. storing electricity with things like pumped storage or chemical or thermal batteries is a challenge, but it is one people are working on and have successfully implemented.
You are dead wrong in your belief that a nuclear power plant will be able to shrug of a drought without issues.
Nuclear power plants are build next to rivers and lakes and oceans for a reason. They need the water for cooling. A nuclear power plant that relies on a river of cold water, will not be able to deal with the river running dry or the water getting too hot either.
Nuclear power is slightly less dependent on environmental factors than most renewables but far from actually independent.
Nuclear power can be a useful tool but it is not a panacea.
One other thing to think about is that nuclear plants like all other major industrial installations are, as you mentioned, “safe when managed responsibly”.
The “managed responsibly” part can be an issue in some places. Corruption and regulatory capture combined with greed of the managers and owners can be devastating to any installation.
It can be bad for a coal a gas plant and catastrophic for a hydro electric damn or nuclear power plant.
If the management can save money by bribing regulators or lobbying politicians to relax regulations, they just might. Look at places like Bhopal for how this might go.
The recent trend of China helping to build nuclear power plants in developing countries with high corruption is worrying as is the tend in places like the US to abolish more red tape and regulations and the way energy companies have influence in politics.
Do you trust the same people who run for example the Texas energy grid not to take small chance of something going horribly wrong if it saves them money?
If you think that government running things would be safer, you haven’t heard of Chernobyl.
Solar panels have far less spectacular failure modes.
Why don’t we encase nuclear waste in concrete and sink it where the continental plate goes under another, taking it to the molten stone core depths eventually?
Look at the history of Hanford nuclear sites, hundreds if not thousands of workers with horrible health issues, leaking holding tanks (because lowest bidder contractors ignored sensors IGNORED f’n sensors telling them theres damn leak) which has penitrated the ground water, what till that starts showing up in the Columbia River.
Japan planned for disaster, they had tsunami walls big enough to handle the waves that hit Fukushima…only the quake dropped the ground level and halved the height of the walls. The reactor site had back up generators which were swamped.
Nuclear plants could be safe when managed responsibly, but in America we don’t manage things responsibly.
There is way too much panic over storing nuclear waste.
Energy can’t be destroyed, so the energy unused in waste has actually existed in uranium ore, in earth, since forever.
The density of energy might be different due to decay chains – but you don’t really need to store it in a much different way than an undiscovered uranium mine: rely on whoever scavanges to use some fucking commmon sense and maybe if he’s a scavanger – have a geiger meter?
And put a panel on it.
This whole “what do we do with nuclear waste” debacle seems way blown out with proportion.
What do you do with natural radiation sources?
You stay the fuck away from them.
It’s not like waste is artificially created extra dangerous energy created by humans, we’re just cleaning up a large area (a mine) of radiation and concentrating it in a small area.
That is implicitly safer, randos walking in caves and digging around are more commoj than randos walking in nuclear storage sites.
> Isn’t finding a place to store nuclear waste easier than that covering acres of land with wind turbines and solar panels?
Sure. We’ve got hundreds of them all around the country. There’s at least one at every single reactor in the nation, by law.
The deep thinkers here are going to say “yucca mountain” a lot, but, in reality, we handle nuclear waste coming out of those reactors every single year.
Just write `nuclear waste storage` and the name of a US state in google images.
[They tend to look like this](https://acs-h.assetsadobe.com/is/image//content/dam/cen/96/web/20180827lnp1-waste.jpg/?$responsive$&wid=700&qlt=90,0&resMode=sharp2).
> it is possible that drought, impaired sunlight, and days with low wind could lead to a day with zero energy or low energy output.
These all happen with great regularity.
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